Sunday, May 29, 2016

Young Andy Malloy is surrounded by tragedy and trouble. His stepmother is dead. His father, accused of her murder, is on the run from a posse led by a brutal sheriff with demons of his own. Andy’s investigation into the crime is about to put him in deadly danger. And the truth, not to mention Andy’s own life, may rest in the hands of a pathetic town drunk and a freckle-faced redhead . . .

BRANDED is a classic novel by the master of Western noir, Ed Gorman. Filled with compelling characters, breathtaking suspense, and stunning plot twists, it’s a yarn guaranteed to please Western and mystery readers and a novel not soon to be forgotten.

(This is one of Ed's best books. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and grab it.)

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Normally I would just provide a link, but this BETTER DEAD review from Ed Gorman’s blog is so smart and trenchant (not a word you hear much these days), I just had to share it with you here. By way of full disclosure, Ed and I are friends, but we are also genuine fans of each other’s work.

BETTER DEAD
In 1983, Max Allan Collins created a brand new sub-genre, something very few writers have ever done. In TRUE DETECTIVE, his first Nathan Heller novel, he wedded the street-wise private detective novel with the historical novel.
The advantages to this approach were enormous. The big blockbuster historical novels were all too often stagey and wooden. Heller not only brought a sense of humor to the dance, he treated the historical figures he dealt with as human beings who farted, told dirty jokes and had the kind of mundane personal problems the big blockbusters never dealt with. In other words, he brought reality to the table.
In BETTER DEAD Heller is hired by Senator Joseph McCarthy to prove that all the victims Tail Gunner Joe is pursuing are actually “Commies.” His particular interest is Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who sit in prison awaiting their execution. This is just how I imagined McCarthy, a drunken, ignorant Mick rummy bent on achieving massive power. He is assisted in this by none other than Roy Cohn, a vile and treacherous figure who just happened to be (half a decade later) one of Donald Trump’s mentors.
But Heller also signs on to help an ailing Dashiell Hammett find evidence that the Rosenbergs have been set up and are innocent.
Collins recreates the Zeitgeist of the era very well. Yes, there were a lot of Communist sympathizers back then, mostly older men and women, intellectuals often, who saw the suffering during the Depression and thought—mistakenly—that Communism was the solution. (I started college in 1962 and took a history class from an elderly professor who was still a Stalinist, despite the fact that we now knew that Uncle Joe Stalin had slaughtered millions and millions of his own people.)
But these weren’t “Communist agents,” just disillusioned intellectuals (the Coen Bros. wittily address this in their latest film “Hail Caesar”).
Collins’ sociological eye never fails. Here’s a description I’ve now read three or four times just because I enjoy it so much. Heller is in the Bohemian heart of Greenwich Village.
“The clientele this time of time of night was mostly drinking coffee, and a good number were drunk, some extravagantly so as artists and poets and musicians sang their own praises and bemoaned the shortcomings of their lessers. These were self-defined outcasts, their attire at once striking and shabby, drab and outlandish.”
Bravado writing on every single page.
Max Allan Collins not only created a new sub-genre—he is its undisputed master.

* * *

Speaking of BETTER DEAD, we are sitting at five reviews on Amazon. We sure could use some more (same for THE BIG SHOWDOWNand MURDER NEVER KNOCKS). ANTIQUES FATE is doing better at twelve reviews.
For those who have not written reviews at Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble before, you don’t have to be Anthony Boucher – just a couple of lines expressing your opinion is all that’s necessary. But more is welcome.

* * *

Here’s a movie you need to go to: THE NICE GUYS.
If you, like me, consider Shane Black’s KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005) the best private eye movie of recent years, you will be a porker in excrement at this one. Set in 1977, the script co-written by Black nails the era to perfection, paving the way for outstanding art direction.
But you won’t go home whistling the sets. The plot, which has to do with the murder of a porn star, is a twisty thing where the detectives mostly stumble onto the clues, but you’ll only be amused. The dialogue has a witty, naturalistic bounce that stands apart from the story, reminiscent of my favorite TV show, ARCHER. And it’s rare that a crime film can be this funny and yet be so tough. There’s a lot of Spillane in this one, particularly by way of Russell Crowe, heavy-set and menacing and rather sweet.
Crowe and his co-star Ryan Gosling are the surprises here. I thought Gosling was an empty pretty boy until I saw him on SNL a while back and he was funnier than the cast. Here he is hilarious without shortchanging the character. I knew I liked this movie, but I loved it when Gosling found a corpse and did a tribute to Lou Costello by way of his “Hey Abbott!”-type reaction.
Warning: it contains lots of nudity and blood splattery violence, and by “warning” I mean “recommendation.”

Monday, May 23, 2016

The Plastic Nightmare

I've written here before about Richard Neely. He wrote non-series crime novels that pretty much covered the entire range of dark suspense. I mentioned that in the best of them the weapon of choice is not poison, bullets or garrote. He always prefered sexual betrayl.

Plastic is a good example. Using amnesia as the central device Dan Mariotte must reconstruct his life. Learning that the beautiful woman at his bedside all these months in the hospital--his wife--may have tried to kill him in a car accident is only the first of many surprises shared by Mariotte and the reader alike.

What gives the novel grit is Neely's take on the privileged class. He frequently wrote about very successful men (he was a very successful adverts man himself) and their women. The time was the Seventies. Private clubs, privte planes, private lives. But for all the sparkle of their lives there was in Neely's people a despair that could only be assauged (briefly) by sex. Preferably illicit sex. Betrayl sex. Men betrayed women and women betrayed men. It was Jackie Collins only for real.

Plastic is a snapshot of a certain period, the Seventies when the Fortune 500 dudes wore sideburns and faux hippie clothes and flashed the peace sign almost as often as they flashed their American Express Gold cards. Johny Carson hipsters. The counter culture co-opted by the pigs.

The end is a stunner, which is why I can say little about the plot. Neely knew what he was doing and I'm glad to see his book back in print. Watching Neeely work was always a pleasure.

Friday, May 20, 2016

'I am long overdue in discussing
an Ed Gorman novel on this blog. There was a time when he had books coming out
from Leisure and Berkley
and I bought whatever I could afford. If any of you are ever fortunate to meet
my wife, she enjoys telling a story about giving me “lunch money” when we were
first married (over thirty years ago) and then discovering I wasn’t eating
lunch. You’ve already guessed what I did with the money. That’s right – the
paperbacks piled up. They continue to pile up. Gorman is one of my favorites. Lawless dates from 2000, published by Berkley, a tough western.
Gorman writes with an economy of style that still fully realizes the scenes,
dialogue and characterization.'

Thursday, May 19, 2016

In1983, Max Allan Collins created a brand new
sub-genre, something very few writers have ever done.In TRUE DETECTIVE, his first Nathan Heller
novel, he wedded the street-wise private detective novel with the historical
novel.

The advantages to
this approach were enormous. The big blockbuster historical novels were all too
often stagey and wooden.Heller not only
brought a sense of humor to the dance, he treated the historical figures he dealt
with as human beings who farted, told dirty jokes and had the kind of mundane
personal problems the big blockbusters never dealt with. In other words, he
brought reality to the table.

In BETTER DEAD
Heller is hired by Senator Joseph McCarthy to prove that all the victims Tail
Gunner Joe is pursuing are actually “Commies.” His particular interest is
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who sit in prisons awaiting their execution. This
is just how I imagined McCarthy, a drunken, ignorant Mick rummy bent on
achieving massive power. He is assisted in this by none other than Roy Cohn, a
vile and treacherous figure who just happened to be (half a decade later) one
of Donald Trump’s mentors.

But Heller also
signs on to help an ailing Dashiell Hammett find evidence that the Rosenbergs
have been set up and are innocent.

Collins recreates the zeitgeist of the era
very well. Yes, there were a lot of Communist sympathizers back then, mostly
older men and women, intellectuals often, who saw the suffering during the
Depression and thought—mistakenly—that Communism was the solution. (I started
college in 1962 and took a history class from an elderly professor who was
still a Stalinist, despite the fact that we now knew that Uncle Joe Stalin had
slaughtered millions and millions of his own people.)

But these weren’t “Communist agents,” just disillusioned intellectuals
(The Coen Bros. wittily address this in their latest film “Hail Caesar”).

Collins’
sociological eye never fails. Here’s a description I’ve now read three or four
times just because I enjoy it so much. Heller is in the Bohemian heart of
Greenwich Village.

“The clientele
this time of time of night was mostly drinking coffee, and a good number were
drunk, some extravagantly so as artists and poets and musicians sang their own
praises and bemoaned the shortcomings of their lessers. These were self-defined
outcasts, their attire at once striking and shabby, drab and outlandish.”

Bravado writing on
every single page.

Max
Allan Collins not only created a new sub-genre--he is its undisputed master.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

It seems only appropriate that I write something about FOUR
LIVES AT THE CROSSROADS for Ed Gorman. He’s in part responsible for my decision
to foist it upon all of y’all.

Bill Hamling’s operation (soft-core erotica while-u-wait)
published the book as a Midnight Reader in 1962, so I must have written it
sometime that year or the year before. (Manuscripts did not spend much time
incubating in Evanston, Illinois. The fledglings lingered only long enough to
be outfitted with a cover and title before being nudged out of the nest and
into the world.)

This one flew off as Crossroads
of Lust, which may or may not have been the title I hung on it. (Lust was so much a Hamling catchword
that I’ve wondered if he ever made the effort to trademark it. I turned in one
novel with the anagrammatically appealing title of Lust Slut, but someone in Evanston changed it to something else.
And, after an all-night poker game had somehow failed to produce a viable
collaborative novel, we who had written it referred to the resultant mess as Lust Fuck.)

But I digress…and probably not for the last time. That was
this book’s title, Crossroads of Lust.
As for its cover, it had nothing much to do with the book, and showed a young
woman on her knees, with her hindquarters elevated. (We’ve been using the
original cover art on our reissues of the Collection of Classic Erotica titles,
but drew the line here; my Goddess of Design and Production said it cried out
for the caption, “Doctor, I’m ready for my enema!”)

Anyway, off it went, Crossroads
of Lust, launched into the world, and set to waste its fragrance on the
desert air. By the time it appeared on shelves wherever bad books were sold,
I’d probably written three or four others. I was at the time doing a book a
month for Bill Hamling (even as a ghostwriter of mine was doing another under
my Andrew Shaw name), and I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my
manuscripts once they were out of the house. I was also writing other books,
more ambitious work in the more demanding world of crime fiction, and those
were the ones I thought about. The Andrew Shaw books took up space in my head
only during the time I spent writing them.

Now Crossroads of Lust
was in fact a little of both, its plot centered upon the armed robbery of
an armored car, the doublecross that ensues, and the two star-crossed lovers
racing to the Mexican border.

This wasn’t the first time Andrew Shaw had straddled genre
lines. Early on, I started writing a book with a counterfeiting background,
with the hope it would wind up as a Gold Medal crime novel. Five or six
chapters in I lost confidence in it, felt it was missing the mark, and sexed it
up enough to make it that month’s entry for Nightstand. I don’t know what I
called it, but the boys in Illinois called it $20 Lust—there’s that word again—and I forgot about it.

But others remembered. Somehow the book came to the
attention of both Ed Gorman and Bill Schafer, both of whom thought far more
highly of it than did its author. They urged me to bring the book out again,
and that was about the last thing I wanted to hear. I went through an enduring
phase when I maintained the sort of non-recognition policy toward my
pseudonymous early work as did United States for so long toward Mainland China,
but with what struck me as better prospects for long-term success; China wasn’t
going away, but Andrew Shaw’s work, printed on non-acid-free paper, very well
might.

God speed the acid, said I.

It took a while, but
eventually Ed and Bill got through to me, and lit a fire under Ego and Avarice,
the matched steeds that haul my chariot. Bill’s Subterranean Press published
the book, now yclept Cinderella Sims, in
hardcover trade and limited editions. When the eRevolution broke out, I brought
it out as an ebook via Open Road, and when my deal with that firm ran its
course, I published it myself as both an ebook and a paperback, including it in
my Classic Crime Library.

Meanwhile, my agent sold it in France, where they published
it purely and simply as a crime novel, and where it did quite well. I dunno,
maybe something was gained in translation.

Never mind. Over the years, Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime
was mining my store of early books, rescuing titles like A Diet of Treacle and Lucky
at Cards and Borderlinefrom the
oblivion I’d always thought they deserved. I entered into the spirit of things
and suggested a few others as Hard Case candidates, and Crossroads was one of them. Charles read it, weighed its merits
against its deficiencies, and after due consideration decided against it. Part
of his problem with the book was that he felt it was misogynistic, and perhaps
it is, or at least several of its characters are.

A few months ago, pleased by the reception which greeted the
16 titles in my Classic Crime Library, I decided what the world needed was a
Collection of Classic Erotica—i.e., the better examples of my work as Sheldon
Lord and Andrew Shaw. Encouraged by the example of my friend Robert Silverberg,
whose view on the subject struck me as far more honest and balanced than my
own, I decided it was time not only to recognize Red China but to establish a
profitable trade deal. (And to help keep the record straight in the bargain;
there are many books out there bearing my pen names that were in fact written
by other hands than mine, and republishing my own work is a way of granting it
an imprimatur and establishing my personal authorship.)

So I took another look at Crossroads of Lust. And pondered where to include it—Classic Crime
Library or Collection of Classic Erotica? Unlike $20 Lust/Cinderella Sims, it didn’t start out trying to be a crime
novel. It was from the first page destined to be that month’s effort for
Evanston, and that it had a crime plot was essentially coincidental. Andrew
Shaw’s books, you should understand, benefited from belonging to an extremely
forgiving genre. They had to be long enough, and they had to have a sex scene
in every chapter, and they had to be written in some form of American English.
Aside from that, they could be whatever they wanted to be, and might include
whatever fermented in the author’s psyche and came out through his typewriter.

Did it occur to me, while I was writing Crossroads, that I might better steer it in an unsullied crime
fiction direction, with a goal of publishing it with Gold Medal or someone
similar? I’m fairly certain I never entertained such a thought. I wanted merely
to be done with it and move on to whatever came next.

And now, all those years later, I began reading the book. I was surprised to
note that I’d dedicated it—to the woman who’d run the Fourth Street Grill in
Newport, Kentucky, an operation described quite faithfully in Crossroads. (You walked into a room with
a lunch counter along the wall. “The counter’s closed, boys,” Madge would
announce. “Would you like to go upstairs and see a girl?” I went there a couple
of times—Newport was across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, which in turn was
an hour’s drive from Yellow Springs, where I went to school—and I never got a
sandwich or a cup of coffee, but I did go upstairs. I wish I’d thought to get a
receipt, that I might write off such visits as tax-deductible research.)

I’ve digressed again, haven’t I? Never mind. I read the
book, and saw why the Sage of Cedar Rapids had lobbied for its republication,
and saw too why Charles Ardai had decided against it. But maybe a little
editing would help.

If nothing else, I could undo some assistance I’d received
from someone in Evanston. The epithet of choice throughout the book was louse, and somehow it didn’t ring true.
We can stand it when James Cagney snarls “You dirty rat!” when what he would
have said was more along the lines of “You fucking cocksucker!”—but he had the
Breen office to contend with, and while Nightstand may have avoided all those
words George Carlin couldn’t say on TV, I would think something like, say, bastard might do the job better than louse.

So I pruned here and tweaked there and rewrote a few
terrible sentences, some of which I may have had the bad judgment to write some
45 years ago. And I began to suspect that what I was doing was putting lipstick
on a pig.

Because the book was an erotic quickie at heart, and my
efforts wouldn’t be enough to change that. Nor did I see much point in yanking
the armored car holdup out of the book and writing a new book around it. It was
what it was, and people would enjoy it or not, and if it didn’t really qualify
for a slot in the Classic Crime Library, it could certainly hold its own in the
Collection of Classic Erotica, where the crime element would only enhance it.

Having reached this conclusion, I went on applying Lady
Danger to those porcine lips, probably giving the process more time than it
needed. And the Goddess and I decided against gracing the result with its
original cover. The Sheldon Lord books for Midwood were blessed with wonderful
cover art, more often than not the work of the remarkable Paul Rader; Hamling’s
books were less well served, and while Harold W. McCauley provided a superb
cover painting for Campus Tramp, as
time passed the covers got progressively shorter shrift. With all that
lipstick, well, Crossroads deserved a
better cover.

And a better title. Four
Lives at the Crossroads struck me as an improvement, and I cobbled up a
cover to fit, and the Goddess took a look at what I’d done and improved it hugely.

And that’s the story, Maurie—as a young fellow named TJ
would tell you. The ebook’s available exclusively for Kindle, while the
paperback should be on sale in a matter of weeks—at the CreateSpace store, from
Amazon, and through other online booksellers as well.

Monday, May 16, 2016

Ben Boulden at Gravetapping has a great review of the new edition of my novel Shadow Games. Here's a small taste:

"I have a particular fondness for Shadow Games. It is not only a terrific novel, but it was my
introduction to the work of Ed Gorman. The year was 2000. I made a habit of
studying and writing in a library not far from where I worked as a pizza
delivery driver; a job I won’t recommend, but a job that treated me well just
the same. My usual table was tucked at the back of the fiction stacks. I sat,
my back to the wall, facing a bookshelf packed with the latest genre titles
making study nearly impossible since the stories beckoned me.

"There was one title that, day after day, caught my attention.
It was a mass market paperback, black background with orange-red print and the
large white Leisure Books logo—a publisher I miss badly—at the top of its spine.
Its title, Shadow Games. When I
finally relented and read Shadow Games,
sitting right there in the library, its tale of Hollywood ambition, perversion,
and lost potential, all told in a darkly humorous tone, made me a lifetime fan of
Ed Gorman’s work."

Sunday, May 15, 2016

This post has been a long time coming. Every year when it gets close to Gravetapping’s anniversary – May 14, if you care – I go through the following thought process:

I should write an anniversary post extolling the virtues ofGravetapping and all my hard work to keep it going, which is immediately followed by—

That sounds like work and my 1.57 regular readers will think I’m a pompous jackass with nothing better to do than talk about myself, which is followed shortly by—

Maybe next year.

Well, this is the year. Why this year and not last year, or next year? The reason is because this is Gravetapping’s tenth year of operation and if I’m going to tell you how awesome I am it seems more forgivable on a big anniversary than a small one.

When I started Gravetapping, a poorly devised Sunday afternoon activity in 2006, it was going to be a place where I reviewed mostly horror fiction, which explains the blog’s creepy name. But as it turned out my fancy for horror faded, without disappearing, and I started reviewing nearly everything genre—crime, mystery, suspense, western, horror, science fiction. At the time I thought it was a passing fancy with a built in excuse to read and study other writers’ work to improve my own. As it turned out I’ve kept at it pretty consistently over the years with only one significant hiatus—okay, it was all of 2011—and an ill-advised move from Gravetapping to a blog no one, not even my 1.57 regular readers, visited called Dark City Underground in 2010.

My blogging experience has been a good one. Sure, there have been moments when I wondered what I was doing, and others when I felt pretty good about what I was doing. I’ve kept blogging because I want to blog, write reviews, think about books, and in my own small way help the literary community as best I can. And believe me, any help I’ve provided has been immeasurably tiny. The emails I’ve received from readers and writers over the years, every one of them positive, have helped me gear up for one more post more times than I can count.

My first post was published May 14, 2006—titled simply “Grave Tapping”—and the most recent, this one, May 14, 2016. Ten years that have been good to me, my family, and I hope yours. Ten years that have seen an unknown number of posts at Gravetapping; unknown because I have a habit of deleting older posts I don’t like, or have been replaced by newer better posts, or are no longer relevant.

I do have a count of the reviews I’ve written expressly for Gravetapping, which is 240 and counting. It has also led me to new opportunities and venues for my writing. I regularly write reviews for Mystery Scene Magazine. I have written a couple introductions for Stark House Press, and I have a project brewing that I dare not speak of since it may jinx the whole deal. And it is all due to Gravetapping.

Happy birthday Gravetapping! Thanks for the good times and, while I can’t guarantee another ten years, here is to the future.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Hemingway liked to talk about how life sometimes bent people, sometimes in such a way that they healed and went on, stronger because of the hurt. He said life sometimes broke people, too. But he never really came to terms with that. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe at the very end Hemingway understood being truly broken, beyond healing, and that was why he went down to the hallway that fine sunny morning outside of Ketchum and put both barrels of the shotgun to his forehead, just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers.

Sunday, May 08, 2016

More than ten years ago—The first crime novel I sold, The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, featured
a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, Neil Gulliver, and his ex-wife, “Sex Queen
of the Soaps” Stevie Marriner. They were enthusiastically adopted by readers
who relished their showbiz-based adventure and wanted more.

Consequently, Neil and Stevie starred in my next three
novels, trading loving, lighthearted banter and sharing danger and tight
brushes with murder and mayhem that involved marquee names such as James Dean,
John Lennon and even Andy Warhol.

Then—

Poof!

Like that.

They disappeared from view, apart from the occasional short
story appearance in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and other publications
over the years.

Gone, but certainly not forgotten, and definitely not because
readers had tired of them.

Au contraire.

As much as I loved treating their fans to the adventures of
Neil and Stevie, I felt trapped. I had never intended to lock myself into a
series. There were other characters and other stories I had in me that were
anxious to bust loose. So, off I went, in time turning out nine standalones
that, happily, kept my readers coming back for more. But—

Their desire for more Neil and Stevie never went away.

At store and library appearances, conferences and
conventions, even in social media exchanges, I was asked, “When are you
bringing Neil and Stevie back?” “Are you ever going to bring Neil and Stevie
back?” “What do you have against Neil and Stevie? What’d they ever do to you?”
“The new stuff is fine, but another Neil and Stevie would be finer for me and
your other longtime readers, sir.” “It’s more Neil and Stevie or no more me,
you get my meaning?”

I always answered by expressing my own affection for Neil and
Stevie and leaving open the window of possibility. It arrived one day, about a
year and a half ago, when I plopped down in front of my computer and stared at
a blank screen, wondering what to follow The
Evil Deeds We Do with.

Neil and Stevie?

Okay, yes, sure, why not, if I could figure out how to
overcome a major obstacle. By the last of those four early mystery-thrillers,
Neil and Stevie had aged substantially and she had moved on from the soaps to
stage and movie stardom.Moving forward
was certainly possible, but moving backward in time might be closer to what
their persistent fans wanted and more fun for me to write.

And that’s how The
Stardom Affair came to pass, like a prequel that’s not exactly a prequel:

It's decades ago, when the internet was in its infancy.

Neil is summoned to the apartment of actor Roddy Donaldson,
leader of the "Diapered Dozen" gang of teenage movie stars, by condo
manager Sharon Glenn. Roddy is in bed clinging to life alongside two dead
girls, no memory of who they are or how they got there. Evidence points to him
as their killer.

At the urging of Roddy's mother, a prominent casting
director, Neil chases after the truth, encountering a motley cast of suspects:
among them nasty Nicky Edmunds, co-starring with pal Roddy in Tough Times Two, and glamorous Jayne
Madrigal, a high-powered press agent with whom Neil is smitten when Stevie
introduces them at a lavish Stardom
Magazine gala.

Also: rap superstar Maxie Trotter and his manager, Roscoe Del
Ruth; Gene Coburn and Knox Lundigan, millionaire partners in Stardom House
companies revolutionizing the internet; model-songstress Aleta Haworth, who
knows more than she's telling; fading film star Brian Armstrong, who harbors
dark truths; and Stevie's mother, Juliet, and her fiancé, Bernie Flame, a
computer whiz who may be able to find answers for Neil in the secret
underground world of the Web. More bodies fall and Neil faces an ugly death
before the killer of the two girls is revealed.

The comments from early readers, fellow authors whose work I
admire, have been extremely generous:

“The author has delivered
a fast-paced, surprisingly dark, not-surprisingly witty thriller that
includes a scene of movieland sex and violence more nightmarish than anything
devised by Nathanael West or David Lynch”—Dick Lochte, award-winning author of Sleeping
Dog

“When one of Hollywood's hottest young stars
finds himself in a tangle with two dead bodies and almost dead of a drug
overdose himself, Neil Gulliver's reporter's instincts are aroused, and he's
plunged into an ever darker world of sex, drugs, and murder. The patter is
snappy, the writing is sharp, and the observations are pointed as a dagger in
another winner from Levinson.”—Bill Crider, award-winning author of the Sheriff
Dan Rhodes mysteries

“From big box office
powerbrokers to L.A.'s seething underworld of designer drugs and porn movies,
you're in for the roller-coaster ride of your reading life. But then, it's
no surprise –Robert S. Levinson is a master of style and suspense. Buy
this book and enjoy!”—Gayle Lynds, New York Times best-selling author of
The Assassins

“Robert S. Levinson handles the hardboiled style of storytelling with
soft, sure hands. Neil Gulliver continues to be one of the most reliable
main characters in the genre. And, along with his ex-wife, Stevie Marriner,
they continue to channel Nick & Nora Charles. Reading The Stardom
Affair is time well spent.”—Robert J. Randisi, best-selling author of the Rat Pack mysteries.

I’m hopeful (of course) The Stardom Affair will also score
positively with Neil and Stevie’s longtime fans and readers unfamiliar with the
darling duo. Whichever category you fall into—be advised The Stardom Affair is available now, on line and off, from your
favorite bookseller.